Welcome to LALos Angeles is a city carved out of the desert – a conjured image of paradise. These are the stories of people who learn what lies beyond the dream – yacht parties with theremin makers that end on the rocks, low-budget filmmaking that blurs the line between truth and fiction, movie stars and Hollywood hopefuls whose stories seem too crazy to be true. Welcome to Los Angeles.

Lost NotesThe greatest music stories never told. Explore the amazing stories of how 60s rock hit “Louie, Louie” triggered an FBI investigation, the outlaw Brooklyn radio station WBAD that tracked the rise of 90s hip hop, and the man who went from Folsom Prison inmate to Johnny Cash’s bandmate.

To the PointA weekly reality-check on the issues Americans care about most. Host Warren Olney draws on his decades of experience to explore the people and issues shaping – and disrupting - our world. How did everything change so fast? Where are we headed? The conversations are informal, edgy and always informative. If Warren's asking, you want to know the answer.

FROM THIS EPISODE

As president of the LA teachers' union, A.J. Duffy was a staunch opponent of charter schools. Now he wants to run one that makes tenure harder to get and streamlines teacher dismissals. We talk with him and his successor as head of the UTLA, and hear about new rules set by the elected school board that could change who gets to control new schools. Do the new rules rely on standardized tests to judge teacher performance? Do they give insiders too much clout? On our rebroadcast of today's To the Point, America and the food revolution.

LA Unified has more charter schools than any other district in the US. That's because of the Public School Choice plan, created to improve schools through competition by allowing outside groups, as well as internal teams, to bid for control of new and under-performing schools. Now the rules have been changed by the elected School Board, to give priority to insiders, meaning the District's own administrators and teachers. As head of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, AJ Duffy was an outspoken opponent of charter schools. Now he's applying to become a charter school operator. He wants to hire teachers from the Crescendo charter schools, which were closed down when administrators ordered teachers to cheat on standardized tests. We speak with Duffy, educators and administrators.

There's a growing backlash against industrialized food production, including tomatoes and chickens that don't taste right and aren't genuinely nutritious. But not everybody can afford to buy the real things. We speak with food writer Barry Estabrook, whose scathing new book is Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, and others about the Good Food movement.